While the first part of this article was mainly about the sound of the Chord DAVE, this part will now try to shed some light on the work of its developer Rob Watts, his thoughts and his very own approach to this technology. This is all the more interesting as the same design principles apply to Rob's other creations of recent times, the MOJO, HUGO and HUGO TT.

My initial idea was to transcribe and shorten Rob's explanations and to compress them into a neat little article about the technology used in the DAVE. But the longer I listened to my recordings of the interview the more I realized that it wasn't just about the electronics inside a DAC. Rob also talked a lot about how chip manufacturers work, shared many anecdotes about his background both as a professional and as an audiophile and often to linked his perception during listening tests with measurements and technical solutions. Especially interesting for me was that he sees spaciousness and perceived depth of the sound as fundamental in his work. Because I thought the readers might find Rob's remarks as interesting as I did what follows is his entire statement in full length, only from time to time interrupted by some questions of my colleague Roland Dietl and my own: as audio-files and complemented by slides from a powerpoint presentation about the technology in the DAVE, courtesy of Rob Watts.

In all DACs that he has developed for Chord, Rob does not use any of the wildly available pre-fab chipsets. Instead he uses Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA) which he programs with his own algorithms to come as close to his idea of the ideal D/A converter as possible. While waiting for my colleague Roland Dietl, Rob and I had a chat and soon arrived at discussing the current DSD hype. As it turned out, he had an interesting opinion about it. According to Rob, the PCM format does have more timing problems than DSD which in turn has to cope with high levels of noise beyond the usable signal frequency range. But if you manage to deal with the timing problems of PCM in the D/A converter, like his own technology does, DSD ends up being the inferior format. This of course piqued my curiosity, and I asked wether these timing problems could be sufficiently dealt with in the D/A conversion only, or if the true solution would be a to have better A/D conversion in the first place. Rob's convinced that his DACs can handle most of the problems but agrees that further improvements could be made by applying the same principles to the process of A/D conversion. It turns out that Rob has given this a lot of thought already and that it is possible that Chord might introduce an A/D converter in the foreseeable future. And that would certainly be something that Yours Truly would like to get his hands on! But I digress … Here is Rob's interview:

Why DaveListen to Rob Watts' Explanations: